Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of biotechnology.
Description of Related Art
Site-specific recombination has tremendous potential for application across a wide range of biotechnology-related fields. Zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) are synthetic proteins, containing a DNA-binding domain and a DNA-cleavage domain, that have been successfully used to enable genome editing. Zinc finger recombinases (ZFRs) are made by fusing a recombinase catalytic domain to the N-terminus of a zinc finger (Akopian et al., 2003). Zinc fingers (ZFs) are just one among many different protein folds that enable proteins to bind DNA in a sequence-specific manner. Unfortunately, DNA targeting using zinc fingers is still limited by the difficulty in engineering novel DNA sequence specificities and site-specific recombination in unmodified genomes is only possible if recombinases can be designed to recognize endogenous target sequences with high specificity.
DNA-binding domains from transcription activator-like effector (TALE) proteins have a significant advantage over ZF domains as TALE protein DNA-binding domain specificity is determined by a straight-forward cipher allowing for the design of custom DNA-binding proteins.